There is information that may be relevant in the future. Team members or teams need some location where information can be dropped in an unstructured manner and referred to it later.

A journal organized events of interest on a timeline. The keeper of the journal may recall important information easier since it may be accessed in multiple ways. One is via the timeline, the others are Provide multiple Views defined by the keeper.

This approach supports "Document First" in an unagitated manner - so it can be applied where it is relevant and introduces no maintenance costs once the information is regarded as not worthy enough to invest in it.

Authors may think through more thoroughly a piece of work before it is conducted. They may collect information on a given topic in a highly unstructured manner. Later - once all relevant information on the topic is collected - the author may decide whether the investment to preserve the information in a more elaborate state is justifying the investment.

Authors of a journal may reflect on work that has been done as part of their personal review. It may also serve as a notebook to prepare team retrospectives.

Keeping a journal takes time, making the information quickly findable needs some practice. If there are multiple entries with very similar information having these pages organized by time may actually finding relevant information much harder. To address this, information should not be duplicated and an entry that carries forward a task started in the past may simply refer to the original event (or delegate to it) and collect the additional information in one location.

A journal may bury information that is relevant for the whole team and should therefore be located in the team space and maintained by the team. To address this problem a journal keeper should communicate each piece of information to the team. The team may then decide collaboratively which information should be preserved in which form in which location.

This practice may collide with the Know your Mission practice: Charters have similar information, which is - in contrast to journals - dedicated to be read by all stakeholders (not only the author or the team). So to collect information in the journal and on the charter document must be avoided. To address this problem it is recommended that the event document references the charter document.

There are two variants to collect information in a defined, yet unstructured way.